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Yesterday I was taking a look at the Myki Customer Experience Panel web site — that’s the set up where they ask a cross-section of Myki users about the system; get them to answer questions about what they’ve seen and how things are working for them. While some may moan about the extra cost, it’s tiny compared to the total budget for the system, and it’s the very type of consultation we need more of, I think.

Anyway, I was clicking around and looked at the Polls page:

…and I thought hello, that photo of all the Metcards looks familiar.

Ah. Yes indeed. Very familiar:

It’s my hand, my photo, snapped in 2010, and originally used in this blog post comparing different fare options for regular PT users.

I don’t actually mind my photos being re-published. I deliberately put a Creative Commons licence on most of what I upload to Flickr. I’m more than happy happy if someone re-using a photo of a PT problem that I’ve snapped helps get a stronger message across.

But I do actually specify my photos as “Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike”…

I haven’t found it yet, but perhaps the Myki Customer Experience Panel’s fine print somewhere hidden away on the site includes the attribution credit?

Some interesting stuff on social media in the Financial Review the other week:

This month, Cathay Pacific partnered with Klout to offer to anyone with a score over 40 free entry to the airline’s business class and first class lounge at San Francisco International Airport, the key hub for those working in Silicon Valley.

Neat, but it appears you had to show your Klout score on an iPhone app. Difficult if you don’t have an iPhone, though I expect the vast majority in Silicon Valley do.

The managing director of recruiter Kelly Services Australia, Karen Colfer, is not on Klout, but says everyone should have a LinkedIn profile.

“If you are not on LinkedIn, you are not serious about your job,” she says.

With a 23-year career in recruitment, Colfer says background checking is becoming increasingly thorough and information is easier to get. Google, LinkedIn and blogs are all fair game, she says.

Public Transport Users Association president Daniel Bowen tweets a lot and follows a mix of people from diverse areas. “Depending on who you follow, it’s obviously highly customisable to what your different interests are,” he says, before warning. “It is addictive … I have to curb my usage, otherwise I wouldn’t get anything done.”

Yesterday iiNet/Netspace had major outage in Victoria. It was eventually fixed, but even after a modem reboot we couldn’t get back online.

Then I noticed the home phone (yes, I still have one of those) was getting no dial tone. My assumption initially was that this was just an unhappy coincidence; I’m unclear as to how a widespread ISP outage would somehow affect a home phone line.

So I rang Telstra, whose call centre person (offshore, I’m assuming, given how scrupulously polite she was) ran through some basic checks before declaring a tech will need to look at the lines on the street.

That will apparently take until Wednesday or Thursday. Sigh.

Netspace support was closed last night by the time I got around to looking at things, but I’ll try and reach them this morning to see if anything can be done from their end.

Until then, apart from limited mobile use, I guess we’re cutoff from the outside world.

Update lunchtime: Got hold of iiNet support; they can’t see a problem that would affect the phone line, but asked me to check the sync light on the modem. Since I’m not at home, they suggested they could ring me back tonight (at 8:39pm to be precise) to go through it with me. Cool.

Update 6pm: Text message from Telstra a couple of hours ago to say all is resolved, and it appears to be so. Woo hoo!

Google Streetview finally updated its pictures, and it includes imagery from that day. Alas, it wasn’t shooting when the car passed us, but it did once it entered the nearby side street — that’s why you can see it turning. So while we’re in view, it’s only from a distance. Still, myself and the boys are recognisable — gotta like that!

My Internet access account got shaped on Sunday afternoon, for the last day-and-a-half of the billing cycle, as we apparently burnt through 30 Gb (peak) in the month. No big deal — it may just mean Youtube is unbearably slow for 36 hours, and I’ll have to curb my practice of having lots of browser tabs all doing stuff at once.

On poking around in the account, I find that Netspace has again upgraded its plans without telling anybody — in fact following iiNet’s takeover of Netspace, they’ve aligned with iiNet’s plans. For the same price as I’m getting 30Gb peak+45 Gb off-peak (midnight to 7am), I could be getting 50 and 50 (with different off-peak hours: 2am to 8am).

I think even the shaped speed has been upgraded, from 56 kbps to 256 kbps. And it offers quota-free access to a bunch of sites in the iiNet FreeZone — including ABC iView. Neato.

There’s a gotcha in the small print: Uploads and downloads are counted towards the monthly quota on all current plans — the existing plan I’m on only counts downloads.

Normally it would be expected that uploads would be much less than downloads, but I don’t know what my upload traffic is like. Maybe my modem/router knows, but I don’t see the option anywhere to tell me. Netgear DG834G — anybody know?

Still, it’s unlikely to be anywhere close to 30Gb down+20Gb up… so I might switch anyway.

(Some people are raving about TPG’s unlimited $59.95 plan. It would cost me a connection fee, but worth looking into… though I don’t know if I could meet the system requirements. Apparently you need a PC with something called a 3.5″ 1.44MB diskette drive, and their support is limited to Win 98 Second Edition, 2000, ME and XP only.)

Update: I decided to go ahead and switch plans. Given the new plan includes uploads in the quota, the Usage tool is now quoting my total downloads and uploads.